The Battle for Middle-earth II improves on 2004's game with a better strategic mode and a much broader scope that encompasses the whole of Middle-earth.

With the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy more than two years in the past now, it seems a bit weird that EA is still pushing ahead with its Lord of the Rings game franchise. After all, 2004's The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth already covered all the ground from the movies. EA's solution, though, was to unify the movie franchise with the general Tolkien license, so now the games can feature content from both the movies and the many Middle-earth books that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. Armed with this unified license, EA has gone about and created The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II, a real-time strategy game that features all of Middle-earth, and not just the stuff we saw in the movies.

Battle for Middle-earth II focuses mainly on the northern part of Middle-earth, where elves, dwarves, and goblins battled it out while those pesky hobbits trekked to Mt. Doom. That means there are new races and factions that we didn't get to see in the original game, complete with their own heroes and specialized units. The elves are supreme archers, the dwarves are miners who build giant war machines, and the goblins rely on spiders and sheer numbers to swamp you. Battles take place in familiar places, such as the Shire, and in unfamiliar places, unless you've read the books, such as Dol Guldur. And if you liked the factions and settings from the original game, don't worry, because they all appear in the game's overarching War of the Ring mode in one form or another.